


made of ivory and gold

by toujours_nigel



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Boozious Consent, Canon Bisexual Character, Dubious Consent, Epistolary, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Rough Oral Sex, Verbal Bondage, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 06:49:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5365424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ethan writes about Dorian and himself, and the night they shared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	made of ivory and gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Savageseraph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Savageseraph/gifts).



> The title is from The Picture of Dorian Grey.
> 
> My thanks to Savageseraph, for allowing me to explore this relationship. I hope it proves a tolerable read.

Dear Miss Ives,

                Were there any possibility of this letter reaching you I ought take a horsewhip to myself as lacking in any semblance of decency, but as it is likelier I should chance upon a Yeti than see your face again or be within reach of a reliable postal service once we come ashore—for in prison they sneer rather at ferrying letters overseas—I believe I might be excused for beguiling my days as I do. It is a tedious voyage even misspent in luxurious state-rooms aboard the best ocean liners, and in the hold amongst the livestock and the luggage it is dismal indeed. Besides it puzzles my jailer to find me so industrious with pen and paper and I delight to so confuse him and his notions of me as a clever animal.

                I call to mind that you had asked me once about the beautiful boy of our dreams. At the time the blush had had barely a chance to rise to my cheek, nor did such a matter lead to questioning by Dr. Frankenstein or Sir Malcolm, so engrossed were we in the matter of your health. It is a question I was hardly expecting, which you must have known even as you were, and it is one you cannot have sought an answer to, especially as matters stand between us. Matters between us, as between all of our company and yet as between thee and me to the exclusion of all else, hardly admit of a veil of reticence. I allude here not merely to your weeks of illness and the necessary immodesty of the sick-room, but more tellingly to our first encounter these many months before. I had not intended the finale to be commonly viewed, but you, my dear Miss Ives, my dear Vanessa, are of very uncommon metal indeed. I should not dare to write in this fashion to the common run of genteel young woman on either side of the Atlantic, even with so little intent of posting the letter as I do now, but to you I might write with the secret knowledge of bringing at most a smile to your lips. To surprise you would be uncommon pleasure, and to shock you is neither my purpose nor within the scope of my powers.

                Mr. Grey and I encountered one another in that wise only once, on the night we had the fortune of all meeting at the Grand Guignol Theater. I wonder do you remember my unfortunate Brona, that I introduced to you, and that was most uncommon affected by the meeting? She deceived me at the time into believing it was only meeting you and seeing me in company with quality that unnerved her so awfully, when in truth she must have been sickening already fatally, and been struck by her misfortune in finding herself at close quarters with Mr. Grey, which she can hardly have thought likely, for when quality throngs to witness gore and melodrama, it keeps itself to the galleries. But it was an uncommon night, full of many surprises, from the play itself—and I need not tell you now how apt and terrible a thing it was to perceive my life enacted with terrible dialogue; I wonder do you think the same when suffering through The Scottish Play?—to our many meetings and indeed their consequences.

                I have wondered since that night and furthermore since your illness, whether he has had us all in the same manner? With my poor Brona indeed it must have been rather more easy, a pecuniary concern above all else, yet what little I have gleaned of Mr. Grey leads me rather to believe the opposite. He is not, or strikes me not, as the sort of man entirely easy without his little illusions of seduction, whether accosting a paid whore, or a willing woman, or a drunken man. They must have all been forced into play one after another, his little bag of tricks, the hall of portraits that overwhelms one with faces, some discourse of art or music, the pliant offering of the body that turns hungry at the last. A well-worn path like some great singer’s practiced repertoire, one tune following another in succession sure to draw applause. Yet he hardly needs any but the last, for you or I seek little comfort in the nearness of others, nor trust easily in charming manners; we know, beasts as we are, as we have been made and have become, how easily all things lie, even the human body, though that least of all. But I dissemble savagely, Miss Ives, and you must excuse the bitterness of a prisoner. Sure I was soothed by his manner, and charmed by him, and rendered defenseless to the breaking of my own heart. It is not my intention to convey the meaning that Mr. Grey had any hand in breaking my heart: what little of it I had brought in my vest from America has been trod upon by Brona’s illness and then yours, and then healed by your recovery and stunning courage.

                Miss Ives, I can very nearly in the dimness of this hold see you shaking your head in fond remonstrance. I picture you seated precariously on a battered old leather trunk, one booted foot resting upon a canvas bag. In your severe clothes you are well camouflaged among the crates, only the pallor of your face and ungloved hands reveal you. Well, Vanessa, shake your head as you like, but I’ve met some brave women in my time, Indian and white and a few Chinese laborers out west and more Mexicans than you could count, and never has any matched up to you in pure stubborn courage. Sembene called you a lion. I try not to think of him too often, but his words ring through me with sincerity. If an African calls you a lion, I figure, it’s worth a mite more than from the mouth of an American, or an Englishman for that matter. We must ask Dr. Frankenstein to be certain, but I doubt there have been lions in these parts in centuries, save on bolts of cloth fluttering pretty in the air.

                It is a strange thing for a man who has been years in the army to prevaricate, yet I find that much delayed blush now rising to my cheek. I am red to my very ears, and warm to the touch. How you should laugh if you saw me now. If you saw me now I might venture to assert that we might occupy ourselves elsewise than in recounting past dalliances. I bring to mind the house your friend the cutwife willed you, and the strange ease with which we submerged ourselves in that quiet life. Even its disruptions and horrors faded into the wild gorse, and though I was furious then, what true difference can it make to such as we who takes a life, for what can we do that is not in service to the other?

                But I was telling you about Mr. Grey, and it is ridiculous to display such cowardice after praising your courage. I would dislike extremely to be ill thought of by you. In the words of a book I have seen you both read and hide from sight, then, and I hope you will excuse both the theft and alteration: Reader, I kissed him. He shuddered in my grip and I could feel the pulse leaping beneath my fingers, the blood coursing through him, and his mouth under mine was warm. Vanessa, I longed to turn his face away and feast on that leaping pulse. I wanted him as ravenously as though he was food, delicate viands heaped before a starving man. In my youth and late childhood I had had boon companions among the _muchachos_ on my father’s ranch in the New Mexico territory, and among the young ranchers who were all the peers I had in that open country, who had made as free of my flesh as of food and drink and indeed of air, as I had of theirs, and in later years I had had the easy camaraderie of the Army with which to make up any lack. Since attaining years and bloodied hands I had not looked to any boy for company, for to bring my too too sullied flesh in intimate embrace with their unspoiled innocence must be repulsive to all nature, and I have not looked with habitual lust upon men of grown years or form any of the spent years of my life. My pleasure in the giving embraces of women has never been feigned, and for some years I had relegated the company of men to the past and solitary remembrance.

                Mr. Grey, suspended as he seems in perpetuity a step beneath full manhood, with his rose red youth and rose white childhood must allay scruple and invite voluptuous thought and deed. His skin bared by his open collar—and I am convinced he bares it to the exclusion of a neckerchief or cravat with much the coy intent of a well-bred young woman displaying the ruffle of her petticoat or a well-turned ankle—was scarce darker than the skin hidden habitually beneath clothing, and that was untinted ivory itself, which many debutantes would have committed murder to obtain. You know of course how easily that pallor turns livid at the touch of ungentle hands, think now and on the prints of your own superimpose my paws, and think again how he looked all marked for and by pleasure. To any observer I might have seemed cruel, bringing to bear my considerable frame and greater strength upon Mr. Grey’s epicene form, grasping him rudely and divesting him in quick and brutish succession of vest, shirt, trousers, drawers. In writing to you I need not explain that he flushed not solely from the hands on his skin but also from the pleasure he gained from them, nor how easily, how gracefully he bared his throat to my attentions. Had it been nearer my time I might have sunk my teeth in him, broad incisors and sharp, elongated, canines and all, a double bow of incisions red on his marble skin. In the dark of the moon I only sucked at him, felt the salt of his crystallized sweat on my tongue, and the redolence of jasmine, the blood beating nearer the surface under the pull of my mouth. When I let go of him he gasped and swayed against me, but in a trice recovered from what in a woman I might have called swooning to smile and smilingly press me down onto the ottoman.

                Vanessa, though he is as lithe as a boy and as beautiful, and though his body bends to the touch with all the suppleness of youth, barring an early apprenticeship in lewdness such as the mind revolts from I cannot but think him older than he appears. Or else I must give credence to the most far-fetched rumors of what is taught in your famed public schools after lessons have given over for the day, sure there are enough salacious tales that cannot be wholly untrue. He knelt before me, still smiling that distant smile, and his hands were quick on the placket of my trousers, and sure in drawing out my—that treacherous blush has returned for an encore, but I shall disregard it in light of other ejaculations that have passed between us—cock. With his hand on it I soon attained a prodigious erection, and would fain have spent thus, for his fingers are long—how they must have played with you, and how you must have admired him—and soft as any girl’s, with the privilege of certainty brought by the long handling of a familiar tool. He set a hand about the base, fairly fisting the curls surrounding it, as though to restrain any ejaculation upon pain of pain, and lowered his mouth to me. He is clever with his mouth, Mr. Grey, quick with insinuation and quick with smiles. You must have had the pleasure of it yourself, and I need say only that he cannot much alter his technique in respect of his paramour’s sex, which I must judge efficacious and economic, for there are parts even in these adjudged usually dissimilar which respond with equal eagerness to similar treatment. The seal of his mouth around you must have been tighter, but there is that in us both that stiffens under attention, and that too that responds lubriciously. That beautiful boy of ours, on his knees with his throat working and his head tipped back and his hair held in clenched fists, his own arousal evident in the unruly jut of an erection and the involuntary thrust of his slim hips and evident also in the palpation of the chest, the hectic color in the hollowed cheeks—who should desire to resist him? I bore him to the ground with my weight, set my knees on either side of his shoulders and, still grasping the tender curve of his skull, held him at my mercy, sprawled ungainly between my thighs, on the glimmering dark floor with all the portraits staring down at his stark white skin. I throttled him with my cock, I held his head in my hands and forced my way deeper into his lax, open mouth, and stopped only when I found the back of his throat, and then thrust forward again and again, and yet again until he came out of his passive stupor and struggled. It was that struggle, his alabaster skin going yet paler, the veins about his distended mouth blue with lack of air and the delicate skin purpling as well, that lent such savor to my pleasure and spurred me relentless into erotic paroxysm.

                Any man that offered such cruelty to a woman I should have horsewhipped. I cannot offer as an excuse that I had only enjoyed the warm refuge of a mouth before as part of a pecuniary exchange; no _madame_ , however careful of her girls, has ever had cause of complaint against me. Nor ought I plead intoxication, though he had plied me with the curious green absinthe that burnt through me like fiery poison. I have further ignominy to confess. In the dawning horror at my uncouth impetuosity, and some I dare say unconscious desire to dissociate myself from the deed, I loosed my hands from about his head and let it drop. The sound of bone on stone, so familiar, echoed in that long room, and I feared a moment that I had hurt him extremely, for the years dropped into his face and he looked very nearly haggard. Such pallor must show bruises easier than my own battered hide.

                Yet he recovered with surprising swiftness. Between one breath and another youth and beauty flooded his frame, and before I had scrambled to my feet and indeed before I had done aught more than mumbling apologies, he surged to his knees, disconcerting me in the extreme, and crowded me against the ottoman with force sufficient to send it skittering over the marble. He kissed me with the bitterness of my ejaculate still coating his mouth, with such fervor as to render me breathless. When we parted all thought of apology had gone from my mind, as had aught but that of bringing him to completion, for I had found during the kiss what I had overlooked in my momentary distress, that my cruelty had inspired him not to terror but answering arousal. He pressed against me most insistently, as if—do not laugh though you might be tempted for I can now think of it in no other way and then barely thought—a hound intent on relieving itself of inconvenient arousal, or—I see words return to me now and I ought scratch out the previous but that I admire your laughter and long to hear it often even confined to my imagination and wrung-out memory—like a child trying to hide itself. I haven’t read much by way of mythology, but there was something I read as a child myself, and I cannot now recollect what or where yet a Classical education will out, about a hero following another and being told he behaves like a child following its mother and tugging tearfully at her skirt and longing for attention. He was something like that, pressed close to my body, not a child but neither quite a hero, slim and supple and beautiful. I’ve been to the Museum in your city once, Vanessa, with my Brona on one of her better days near the beginning of things and watched her laugh at treasures I could hardly—Vanessa he looked to me like living marble, though warm to the touch and beautifully responsive, like one of Lord Elgin’s friezes had come whole and alive and chanced into my rough grip. In that moment there is little I would not have ventured for him, and little I would have sought in return. I have little indeed of becoming modesty—if modesty become a man and be not the sole province of chaste maidens—and I have made ruthless use of my comeliness in the past, yet with him I felt the fear of a child accosted with something infinitely beautiful and infinitely delicate, as though I were ten again, and my knees skinned and my hands dirty and my mother glaring at me for despoiling precious lace. I had throttled him some minutes previous and now my hands trembled as they rested on the nape of his neck, on the protruding bones of his slim hips. For all his arousal and all his diffidence he was calm yet, his breath even and his cheek pale and his voice measured when he took me by the hand and led me to his bed. The clothes we left littering the floor, like trophies on the field.

                Vanessa, when you bedded him were you in truth in his bed? In the early evening I had not thought of it, and in the latter hours, when his smile lingered on me and then his mouth, I had still not hoped for it. I had been with men in my youth, and even in the Army, but comfort between soldiers happens no more in a soft bed than does a frantic tugging between boys. Though they might stray beyond those bounds beds and bedrooms were the exclusive province of women, to my mind. The ottoman was comfortable enough and would have served.

                Hs bed—whatever you might have thought of it—was over-large to my eyes and the room appointed beautifully if overly ornate. All this I thought on the morrow, creeping from his bed and finding my way to the portrait hall and dressing under their disdainful eyes. I thought then only how wonderfully soft the bed was, how delightful the sheets beneath me and his weight pressing me into them, how tempting the lithe form of him so close and yet distant, how firm his grip on my straining wrists. A dog is a creature that comes from wolves and lives with men. Under his hands, under his weight I turned calm myself, sharing in his unperturbed manner. He offered me a distant, approving smile, beneath which I doubtless ought not have glowed as I did, and withdrew his hands, his anchoring weight. I stayed supine, my wrists still above my head, and crossed as though some invisible rope had fixed them there and not simply his will and the hope of another smile. I tracked him as he moved, down the bed and across the room, with my eyes as long as I was able and then with other senses. Even on the thick carpeting so many of your fine houses sport it is possible to distinguish the sound of casual footsteps, and of stealthy ones: a man at his quietest still brushes against his own garments in a susurration of skin and textile. And Dorian favors perfumes as I had found, and in that room with its still air the scent of lavender crept insidiously into my nostrils. He went far from me, to the bounds of the room, and looked about in bureaus and released a most powerful bouquet of fragrance into the air, and then approached again, his steps weighted down with care, something in his arms redolent with combating scents.

                He set it on the bed, quite close to my head, that I might see it and distinguish by sight as well as smell his casket of unguents. Such things being less needed indeed by women than men I cannot venture as to your knowledge of this of his possessions, though in truth even among men they are not strictly necessary, and in my years of debauchery I have scarcely encountered such lavish arrangements. Though in truth I had not encountered such perfumes before, and seeing one ought have anticipated the other. He took his time about it, though his arousal had plainly not abated, and I strained still against the bonds of his smile, of the memory of his hands on mine, finally tipping it red into his palm, a little pool smelling wonderfully sharp. The name of it was foreign to me when he pronounced it, and his other hand playing about my sides and stroking over my chest and belly had rendered me at once somnolent and aroused, a sluggish state of bliss wherein the body could hardly participate. I asked no more questions, I hardly thought. I was in the moment a passive vessel waiting to receive him, designed for the wringing out not of my pleasure but of his, as we hear women are though the evidence of my own life and senses rebels against that particular piece of dogma. Nobody having gone to bed with a willing, eager woman, could think her pleasure lay solely in his, though many wives and many whores might suffer a man’s lust for other reasons and then lay still indeed.

                The province of submission belongs indeed to another category of being, one who craves the relief that comes hard on the heels of cessation of control, or one who seeks out punishment for absolution or for carnal pleasure. I do not mean slaves, though my grandfather kept them and my father treated some of his ranch-hands scarcely better. Slaves are kept down by boot and lash and evidence abounds of how fervently and at what cost and danger to themselves they attempted to escape those bonds. I speak of the rapture of surrender that is thought so becoming to a woman and so degrading to a man. It features heavily in sermons and in pornography and that night, Vanessa, I was in those matters his slave. All the violence I had felt in his atrium, in the high blood of my quick arousal, all the anger of the evening’s conversations and encounters, had bled from me in his bed. He pressed into me unresisting, his fingers coated with the oil and sharp. Have you ever bitten into the slick skin of a pepper and through the pith of it, through the seeds? Think of that, of the heat coating your mouth and climbing your throat, and think again of how tender the flesh is within our bodies, how thin the skin and rife with capillaries. He slicked me with oil of capsaicin, opened me up as my body tried to close around the pain like an animal with a wound. In that extremity of pain I wept and screamed and pleaded, but he proceeded irregardless, and in the final moments of it, as his fingers withdrew the pain turned to pleasure as seizing as the pain, as insidious. I ached still, but now I ached for him, I ached in emptiness. He edged a knee between my thighs to leave me spayed open, and I in longing pressed myself against it and smiled when he smiled. We had drunk the bottle dry, he and I, and yet I felt intoxicated only with him. Every thread, every knot of embroidery on the sheets, the heft of the pillow beneath my hips, pressed indelibly into my skin, the rasp of hair on his legs brushing mine, the scents of him intermingling, the weight of empty air weighted with his will on my wrists, the sight of him naked and eager, all pressed indelibly into my memory. I can close my eyes still and disappear from this dank hold over-filled with crates and the stink of animals long gone to table and be in an instant transported to his bed again, as easily as I can be in that cottage on the moors, and easier yet. That night lives behind my eyes and this letter is above all an experiment. If it is transferred to paper, inked onto its surface, mayhap it will fade from my recollection. I have forgotten much in time and need.

                To himself he was kinder than to me. He cleaned, fastidiously, the hand he withdrew from me, and the oil he poured on himself exuded a lighter fragrance, nothing so sharp as mine, nor so red to every sense. He pressed into me unresisting. My body gave way to him, greased with pain, and I arched to his touch, to his flesh intruding upon mine, to the pressure again of his hands upon my wrists where his phantom fingers had lingered all this while. He put his body in mine, and I swallowed it whole, I took him in greedily, too far gone for even a perfunctory show of reluctance, intent only on wringing pleasure from him. Vanessa I could have eaten him raw and sucked the marrow from his bones and not felt so replete as with his pego stoppering me, sparking pleasure from pain, each unbearable. I was ravening from that first kiss, or perhaps that first glance at the theater for all he smiled at you next moment full eager and even my eyes went to you unerringly as a compass swinging to true north, and full satiation left me lethargic, or mayhap the frantic pace of our lovemaking might be credited with it. It is widely reputed a womanly pleasure, to desire such intrusions, and I have hotly disagreed with those who thus opine if at times solely in the confines of my own skull, for however humiliating it must be for a woman to be branded hysteric, that at least is assumed an excess of her nature, but to be branded a sodomite is to have sinned against it. And the prison ain’t exactly a cheery thought but there I’m bound anyway, if for truer crimes than finding pleasure.

                Vanessa my words will never reach you, nor will this letter be posted for I am being put away for my lupine transgressions though the inspector taking me to the States is ignorant of what he has in his grip. I have ever felt indifferent towards the ocean, and on my previous voyage remained far too occupied to pay heed to aught but managing tempers and temperaments, to say nothing of the animals in the hold. Now of course I’m better schooled about being an animal in the hold and I can more than sympathize with them, I’m spooked myself rather. The waves lap at the shell of the ship, and though it looks sturdy to the eye and wide, yet water I’ve seen can wear down stone and at night in the darkness it is an unnerving sound that whispers in the ear and infiltrates the mind. All night long I hear and wake fearing it has seeped in, insidious, through some crack, every night it has grown stronger, pulled along by a stronger moon. I can do without a multitude of things, and starvation don’t bother me much as it ought, but to live without air is a thing that is impossible even for such beasts as I. Yet, shackled as I am, were the ship to take in water there is naught I could contrive that would let me escape. I have been in chains before, and not for pleasure, but have yet had watchful eyes on me, my father’s, or Sembene’s, or of other men who have since died. The inspector in his ignorance deems it well to leave me for long intervals unwatched. If he treats one thus he presumes a man in some part similar to himself, how might he treat a known beast? Men die for lack of air as well as any dumb animal, and lack the strength that might give me a slender chance. If there is water tonight I might break from my chains, for they are not silver and my beast is strong, and after it I could feed. Yet if I cannot break from them, and even should I break from them, I can hardly swim the Atlantic, but must sink to a watery grave to puzzle some future colleague of our doctor’s in washing ashore. In death would my bones shrink to a man’s, or remain monstrous, and what of my soul? Is there a heaven, do you think, or a hell for monsters who hunt to eat and who, animal, cannibalize those in other guise their own, or shall I wander even in death the grey limbo that is mine in life?

                It is little to wonder at, indeed, if my mind turns again to that night, and yet again. My nights with Brona were tinged often with sorrow, heavy with the knowledge of the doom hanging over her, and to think of some lightskirt would hardly suffice. You I think of often enough that to write of it to you would inflate your ego to monstrous proportions, though perchance you need the reassurance. For a confident woman, my dear Miss Ives, you think too little of yourself. If I cannot think of you as solace on my lonely nights I have only myself to blame. I think of you on my long days, your smile, your sharp words that could turn so warmly comforting, your strength in battle and in waiting. At night, some nights, I think of Brona and wake weeping. Some nights I think of Mr. Grey and wake wanting. One does as little good as the other, but a change is as good as a trip.

                What change is this for you, Vanessa, alone in that house again? Have you found new friends, or returned to your old haunts, or the tea-parties and society rounds you profess to find so excruciating? I think sometimes of you and Sir Malcolm having set up house, with the good doctor a not infrequent visitor, and Mr. Lyle one impossible to be rid of. He’s sweet on Sir Malcolm, that one, for all he flutters his eyelashes at anyone in trousers. That house lives in my dreams, rinsed of all the fear we experienced in it, redolent not of sulphur and gunpowder but old books and maps and that elusive perfume you use that so tantalizes the senses. We were not long a merry company, but what months, what days we have passed in that house with the bitterness of pain and fear and anger rising about us and yet for all that I would venture and risk all that I have and am to be again sitting in the library with Victor haranguing Sir Malcolm about something obscurely scientific that he is convinced will prove the key to esoteric mysteries and to look up at the susurration of silk and see you in the doorway beckoning us to dinner. Sometimes I carry my delusions forward, and seat us about the dinner table, you and I, Sir Malcolm and Mr. Lyle, Victor and whatever companion he has constructed from medical texts; further yet and imagine us at the theatre, or the zoological gardens, or at some exhibition of exotic plants, or marveling at marble beauties in the British Museum and looking up from man or beast or flower or stone into Mr. Grey’s beautiful visage and taking him each by an arm. We will not bid farewell to Sir Malcolm, but leave him on his lonely promenade in the deepening gloom and go as the gas lights are lit into that house with its glowering portraits, and there, Vanessa, we will try your demon and see whether he rides you only when your flesh is breached and if you can sit still and watch as the answer to your questions is revealed. I think you would like it well enough, to see our beautiful boy sport with me and show himself master. Behind my eyes I can see your face flush and your slender fingers fist. Would it be in anger, my darling, or jealousy, or simple lust? I’ll put money on the last, if ever I may, but to have you fly screaming at me and catch your hands and have Dorian take your mouth and have you between us for sleep when we are sated each in our own way, Vanessa I think I would sleep a dreamless sleep indeed, heavy as death and as peaceful.

                It is a sweet dream to hang on to, and I am hanging on to it with teeth and claws and all my fangs that are now springing bloody from my torn jaw. Can you see the moon from your window? Through the porthole it is bright enough, here away from the smog of London, and the rays creep into my cage. Look for me in the paper as news of sunken ships; in the obituaries, they will mention me, if they do, by another name.

                Think of me, if you can, as

Devotedly yours,

Ethan Chandler

**Author's Note:**

> My poor beta had to suffer through me excitedly exploring the terrifying world of Victorian pornography and quote the worst bits at her while laughing increasingly hysterically, ditto with the effects of absinthe and capsaicin. Poor FN.


End file.
